About Elliot

In short, I run a one-man product studio as an independent designer and web developer. Prior to that I worked at Realmac Software on a number of products, the most well known of which are Clear, Ember and RapidWeaver.

I was born to an English mother and Canadian father, and raised on the Lancashire-North Yorkshire border in northern England at a time when music was listened to on things called cassettes that had to regularly be fixed with a pencil.

I attended a wonderful Montessori primary school in England before the family upped sticks and moved to a rural town in a region of France known for its volcanoes, cheese and cows when I was 8. Thus started the most challenging period of my life to date: learning France’s language and adapting to its culture whilst trying to integrate into its education system.

Whilst hard, the move to France provided lots of opportunities. Over the following years I converted from league to union after joining the local and school rugby teams, discovered the liberation that is skiing and eventually raced at a decent level, trained as a Fireman and (eventually) got through my exams in French.

A few years after we moved to France, the old Windows box was on the blink and I needed a new computer. I wound up with a white unibody Macbook that ran a now laughable 2GB of DDR2 RAM. It wiped the floor with what I was coming to it from though.

That Macbook came with iWeb—Apple’s old website WYSIWYG software that shipped as part of iLife. That was the software that led me to my love of design and code. I played with it incessantly.

Eventually I transitioned from iWeb to iWeb and Photoshop to Photoshop and hand-writing code. From there I got into the WordPress and Envato communities and had a lot of fun creating themes and stock graphics for ThemeForest and GraphicRiver.

As my interest in all things Web grew, my already limited interest in all things school diminished. I wound up studying business and accounting at a boarding school about an hour from where we lived, figuring that as I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I might as well study something that would always be useful.

I don’t remember when it became apparent to me that a career could be made out of tinkering away in Photoshop and writing code day-in day-out, but it did. With that, 2 years into business school, I dropped out, moved back to England (Brighton), and took a job with Realmac Software.

Over the course of the following three and a half years I worked with Realmac’s founder / creative director, product manager and a host of engineers and QA guys on 1 major version of Clear, 2 major versions of RapidWeaver, the first release of Ember 2, the first release of the Typed markdown app and the first release of the Typed.com blogging software, as well as countless product pages, marketing graphics, emails and icons.

During my time at Realmac, our work was recognised by a number of 3rd parties, winning a Best of 2015, Best of 2013 and two Editor’s Choice awards from Apple, two Amazing App Award awards from Mac Format, and a nomination for the German Design Award. We also successfully funded an Indiegogo campaign and I was fortunate enough to be nominated for .NET Magazine’s Young Designer of the Year award.

In 2016 I started to yearn for something new, and wound up striking out on my own. I’m still in the early stages of this new adventure, but as things stand I’m looking forward to seeing where it will lead.

Contact

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, comments, etc.

Email address: elliot@elliotekj.com.

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